About

This site was put together by Patrick McEwen (you may know him from Twitter or social media as the Lacrosse Film Room guy) and is intended to be an advanced stats site for college lacrosse similar to what Ken Pomeroy does for college basketball on kenpom.com.

The possession data all comes from the official play by plays published on the NCAA statistics website and is calculated by parsing through them to count possessions.

Tap or click the table header to sort data according to that column. Tapping or clicking on the team names will expand the row to show all of the rankings for that team in addition to the data itself.

Here is a brief explanation of the different numbers and ratings currently shown on the site:

Teams Ranking Pages

Rating is the overall team rating based on a Pythagorean expectation calculation based upon each team's adjusted offensive and defensive efficiencies as well as an opponent adjusted measure of possession percentage.

Except for the D1 Men's ratings. The problem of computing overall team ratings in lacrosse is uniquely difficult because of face-offs and non-alternating possessions. D1 Men's team ratings have been switched from Pythagorean win expectation to predicted score margin vs a fictional D1 average team in a game played at D1 average pace. Slightly more explanation here and more on the way at some point.

AdjO and AdjD are the opponent adjusted offensive and defensive efficiencies for each team computed the same way that they are on KenPom. You can think of it as the percentage of the time that a team would score or allow a goal against a theoretical, perfectly average D1 opponent.

Pace is the adjusted tempo for each team (equivalent to KenPom.com's AdjT) measured in possessions per game and is based upon the assumption that the actual pace of a game should be the average of the two teams' adjusted tempos.

SOS is the strength of schedule and is measured by the rating of the hypothetical team that would be expected to win exactly 50% of their games against the team's schedule. This is known as the Win50 measure of schedule strength and is used by people such as Jeff Sagarin and Ken Pomeroy because it better deals with outliers than the mean or others averages. This is a change from the original version which used the mean of the opponents' ratings.

RPI is the Rating Percentage Index used by the NCAA tournament selection committee. Mine is updated continuously with the rest of the rankings as new play by play data becomes available, so it may be ahead of or behind the official ones published by the NCAA. You can read more about how it is computed here

Offense and Defense Pages

AdjO and AdjD are the exact same as they are on the team rankings pages. The idea of these tables of additional stats is to help give you an idea of some of the different factors that contribute to a team's adjusted efficiency numbers. The numbers the way their represented aren't necessarily directly involved in calculated the adjusted efficiency numbers, but they end up being reflected in the final adjusted numbers.

RawO and RawD are the raw, unadjusted offensive or defensive efficiency. It's the average of the raw efficiency for each game in order to more accurately reflect how the team plays in their average game and to avoid weighting games with more possessions due to a faster tempo or a lopsided face-off battle.

OSS and DSS are offensive strength of schedule and defensive strength of schedule and are the mean adjusted efficiencies of their opponents. They are labeled such that the offense and defense refer to that of their opponents. So if you want to know about the strength of schedule faced by a team's offense, look at their defensive strength of schedule.

The calculation is done on a game by game basis and is a little bit more complicated, but you can basically think of adjusted efficiency as being determined by a combination of raw efficiency and strength of schedule. Teams that face tougher than average slates of opponents will have their offensive efficiencies adjusted upwards and their defensive efficiencies adjusted downwards.

TO% is the percentage of a team's possessions that end in a turnover, either offensively or defensively. This includes both caused and uncaused turnovers.

If a game is scored correctly, every possession other than ones at the end of a quarter or a half will end in either a shot or a turnover. Therefore, shooting efficiency and turnover percentage are essentially the two factors that go into determing a team's raw offensive or defensive efficiency.

OPPG and DPPG stand for offensive or defensive possessions per game and are simply the average number of possessions per game that a team has the ball for on offense or faces on defense.

RPI Pages (D1 only)

RPI is the same as on the team pages. Win%, OpW% and OOW% are win percentage, opponents' win percentage and opponents' opponents' win percentage. They are the three factors that combine to calculate a team's RPI. You can read more about that process here.

The three strength of schedule factors are averages of the RPI's of team's opponents. Top10 is the average of the team's top 10 highest RPI ranked opponents. Win is the average RPI of all of a team's wins and Loss is the average RPI of all of a team's losses.

Top5 and Top20 are the team's records against the top 5 and top 20 ranked teams by RPI respectively.

This is a calculation of RPI that takes into account future opponents for the 75% of the RPI that is strength of schedule. It does not attempt to predict the results of those future games

This measure will tend to be much more predictive of where a team's RPI will be at the end of the season.

Player Stats Pages (D1 only, for now?)

First of all, I want to say that scraping the play by plays is the only way to get all of these stats and all of the potential mistakes in them and variations can make it very difficult to do perfectly. As a result there are probably a few minor mistakes in here on things like capitalization or punctuation in players' names.

Secondly, when it comes to advanced player stats, I think people all too often set out to try and create one single number that attempts (and fails) to be an all encompassing measure of individual player contributions. As nice as it would be to have such a number, there is so much work to be done on the building blocks to get there.

Points is exactly that while per100 is points per 100 team possessions (no way to know when a player is on the field, so that's the best I can do) and %Team is the percentage of a team's gaols scored or assisted by that player.

The next five columns are all the different types of goals and assists. The sum of all five is the players total points. The first three of those columns are all stats at even strength or short handed (really any non man-up goal). UnAG are unassisted goals, AstG are assisted goals and EAst are even strength assists. The next two are man-up points. EMG are extra man goals and EMA are extra man assists.

A/TO is assist to turnover ratio. ShEf is shooting efficiency which you can think of as goals scored per possession used up via shooting. SVOR is shooting value over replacement and is an estimate of how many extra goals a player scores over replacement level shooting with the possessions they used up as a shooter. Shooting efficiency is described in detail in this article and SVOR is discussed in this one.

The website is all custom code that I wrote using Angular v2 with a NodeJS server and Bootstrap for CSS.